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PLACE  OF  MISSIONS  IN  THE 
THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


BY  ROBERT  E.  SPEER,  M.A. 


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LAYMEN'S  MISSIONARY  MOVEMENT 


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THE  PLACE  OF  MISSIONS  IN 
THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


An  address  delivered  at  the  Foreign  Missionary  Jubilee  Convention  of 
the  United  Presbyterian  Church,  Pittsburg,  Pa.,  December  6-8,  1904 


BY 

ROBERT  E.  SPEER,  M.A. 


Copyright,  1907 

The  Board  of  Foreign  Missions 
of  the 

United  Presbyterian  Church  of  N.  A. 


The  price  of  this  pamphlet  is  5  cents 
per  copy,  40  cents  per  dozen,  $2.50 
per  hundred,  express  charges  prepaid. 


THE  PLACE  OF  MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT 
::  ::  ::  OF  GOD  ::  ::  :: 


N  thinking  and  planning  about  missions  it  is  a 
wise  thing  for  us  to  try  to  go  down  as  deep  as 
deep  as  we  can  and  to  lay  this  missionary  enter¬ 
prise  on  its  very  bottommost  foundation.  That 
foundation  is  not  found  in  the  consideration  of 
the  results  and  triumphs  of  the  missionary  work,  great  and 
beneficent  and  of  divine  character  as  we  believe  these  to  be.  A 
powerful  argument  undoubtedly  can  be  made  on  behalf  of  the 
missionary  enterprise  and  the  obligation  of  the  Christian  Church 
to  carry  it  forward  on  the  basis  of  the  greatness  and  beneficence 
of  its  results.  I  believe  it  can  be  proved  that  there  is  no  power 
in  the  world  comparable  with  the  power  of  Christian  Missions 
to  transform  the  lives  of  men  and  introduce  better  conditions  of 
life.  In  his  great  book  on  Christian  Missions  and  Social  Prog¬ 
ress,  Dr.  Dennis  has  made  out  his  case  unanswerably.  I  be¬ 
lieve  it  can  be  proved  that  there  is  no  force  in  the  world  com¬ 
parable  with  the  force  of  Christian  Missions  upon  the  politics 
of  nations,  to  bring  about  better  government  in  the  world.  And 
we  all  believe  that  there  is  no  force  like  the  force  of  missions 
comparable  in  power  to  accomplish  the  spiritual  transformation 


2 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


of  character  and  to  awaken  in  the  dead  souls  of  men  the  very 
life  of  God. 

And  there  are  circumstances,  doubtless,  when  the  argu¬ 
ment  on  behalf  of  missions,  grounded  on  considerations  like 
these,  is  the  most  powerful  argument  that  can  be  urged.  It 
is  wrong  for  us  not  to  think  of  considerations  like  these.  If 
our  movement  cannot  be  judged  by  its  fruits  it  can  make  no 
appeal  whatever  to  reasonable  and  thoughtful  men.  And  noth¬ 
ing  could  be  more  natural  than  that  now  and  then  we  should 
pause  to  look  back  over  what  we  have  tried  to  do,  and  ask 
ourselves,  whether  we  have  been  doing  wisely  and  whether  what 
we  have  succeeded  in  doing  has  justified  all  its  enormous  cost 
of  money  and  life. 

And  yet  there  is  a  deeper  ground  than  this  on  which  to 
rest  the  missionary  enterprise.  The  consideration  of  its  triumphs 
is  not  always  applicable.  If  in  the  early  days  of  your  mission¬ 
ary  enterprise  men  should  have  challenged  your  right  to  pro¬ 
ceed  with  this  enterprise,  on  the  ground  that  the  results  were 
inadequate,  you  would  have  had  no  reply.  I  read  only  a  few 
days  ago  a  letter  from  one  of  our  secretaries  who  has  just  gone 
out  to  visit  our  missions  in  western  Africa,  and  he  spoke  of  hav¬ 
ing  met,  on  the  steamship  on  which  he  was  going,  two  mission¬ 
aries  of  the  English  church  who  had  wrought  for  seven  years 
with  only  two  converts,  and  one  of  those  a  little  lad  of  twelve, 
in  Hausaland.  For  eleven  years  the  missionaries  wrought  in 
Foo  Chow  with  only  two  converts,  and  after  the  first  twenty- 
three  years  of  our  mission  work  in  South  China,  we  numbered 
only  thirty  converts.  And  if  we  are  to  justify  our  missionary 
enterprise  in  the  Mohammedan  world  on  the  ground  of  the  visi- 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


3 


ble  results  and  have  no  other  evidence  in  its  support,  I  suspect 
we  would  be  able  ill  to  command  the  support  and  sympathy  of 
a  great  body  of  Christian  men. 

And  not  only  is  this  argument  not  always  applicable,  but 
there  is  no  such  binding  obligation  in  it  as  is  to  be  found  in  the 
great  foundation  of  missionary  enterprise.  I  may  persuade  a 
man  that  the  missionary  enterprise  can  accomplish  great  re¬ 
sults,  that  it  ameliorates  the  conditions  of  human  life,  that  it 
purifies  the  institutions  under  which  men  live,  but  I  cannot  con¬ 
vince  him  by  arguments  like  these  that  he  is  bound  by  obligations 
that  he  cannot  escape,  to  participate  in  this  great  enterprise. 
What  we  should  want  to  do,  it  seems  to  me,  is  to  discover  to 
ourselves  again  those  unassailable  foundations  on  which  this  en¬ 
terprise  rests,  and  on  which  rests  the  obligation  from  which  the 
Christian  Church  cannot  release  itself.  What  I  should  like 
to  speak  about  for  a  little  while,  accordingly,  in  the  place  of 
missions  in  the  thought  of  God,  and  the  obligation  to  carry  for¬ 
ward  the  missionary  enterprise  that  rests  on  all  Christians,  be¬ 
cause  the  missionary  enterprise  is  thus  grounded  supremely  in 
the  thought  of  God  himself. 

Let  us  think  at  the  outset  for  just  a  moment  of  the  place 
of  missions  in  the  thought  of  God  as  revealed  to  us  by  what 
we  know  about  His  character.  We  believe  in  Him  as  the  soli¬ 
tary  God,  the  one  God,  the  one  true  God.  If  men  do  not  own 
Him  for  their  God,  they  are  Godless  men.  By  just  as  much 
as  we  believe  that  our  God  is  the  one  God,  must  we  believe 
that  He  is  the  God  of  every  man,  the  whole  world  around. 
As  we  believe  in  His  Omnipotence  and  His  solitariness  we  be¬ 
lieve  also  in  His  love,  and  know  that  no  man  anywhere  in  the 


4 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


world  can  slip  out  of  the  affection  of  the  Father,  that  it  is  not 
His  Will  that  any  man  should  perish,  but  that  all  the  world 
should  come  to  repentance  and  to  life ;  and  that  His  great  father 
heart  is  beating  in  patient  and  eager  love  for  every  human  soul. 
We  see  these  great  affections  of  God  going  out  toward  men 
in  the  history  of  His  revelation  of  His  life  in  the  world.  We 
realize  that  He  had  to  begin  with  some  single  race,  and  it  is  not 
strange  that  that  race  came  to  think  that  it  was  not  the  channel 
alone,  but  the  end  of  the  love  and  grace  of  God.  But  as  we 
look  back  over  the  years  we  realize  that  He  began  with  that 
one  race,  not  that  He  might  end  with  it,  but  because  He  must 
begin  somewhere  in  the  world  of  men,  intending  never  to  end 
until  He  had  gathered  in  the  whole  world  and  every  tongue 
should  confess  Him  as  its  Father  and  its  God.  We  cannot 
think  of  God  without  thinking  of  Him — I  say  it  reverently — 
as  a  missionary  God.  If  He  were  anything  else  than  that, 
we  could  not  think  of  Him  as  being  God  at  all.  Our  very 
conception  of  Him,  of  His  attributes,  of  His  qualities,  com¬ 
pels  us  to  think  of  Him  as  the  God  of  the  whole  world,  and 
of  the  whole  world  as  His. 

Think  in  the  second  place  of  the  revelation  we  have  of 
the  place  of  missions  in  His  thought  as  revealed  in  His  Son. 
Whatever  limitation  there  may  be  to  the  law  of  heredity  any¬ 
where  in  life,  there  is  no  limitation  to  that  law  in  God.  What¬ 
ever  we  see  in  God’s  Son  we  may  be  sure  we  shall  find  in  God. 
We  think  over  the  life  of  our  Lord  Jesus  Christ,  and  His 
coming  here  was  a  missionary  act,  a  mission,  so  to  speak.  He 
was  always  referring  to  it  so.  “I  came  not  to  do  My  own  Will, 
but  the  Will  of  Him  That  sent  me.”  ‘‘He  that  sent  Me  is 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


5 


with  Me.”  “  The  Father  hath  sent  the  Son  to  be  the  Saviour 
of  the  world.”  His  conception  of  His  coming  into  this  world 
of  ours  was  a  purely  missionary  conception,  and  those  who 
associated  with  Him,  from  old  Simeon,  as  he  took  the  little 
child  in  his  arms  in  His  infancy,  down  to  the  very  last  day, 
realized  that  His  presence  here  was  a  great  revelation  of  the 
missionary  affections  of  God.  The  message  that  He  spoke 
here  in  the  world  was  a  missionary  message,  a  message  to  all 
men,  Jew  and  Gentile,  rich  and  poor,  Pharisee  and  Publican. 
The  message  that  He  spoke  was  a  message  to  all  men,  an  ade¬ 
quate  supply  for  every  man’s  need,  rich  man,  poor  man,  Jew 
and  Gentile,  saint  and  sinner,  to  every  man  He  came,  realizing 
that  every  man  had  need  of  Him. 

The  spirit  that  He  manifested  while  He  walked  in  the 
world  was  a  missionary  spirit.  Born  in  the  limitations  of  His 
own  race  and  time,  the  noble  thing  about  Him  was  that  He  saw 
no  narrower  horizon  than  the  uttermost  souls  of  men,  that  He 
went  through  the  world  free  from  all  petty  racial  jealousies 
and  ill  feelings  and  divisions,  loving  the  whole  world  with  an 
equal  heart.  “I  am  the  light  of  the  world,”  was  His  Word. 
“The  bread  which  I  will  give  is  My  flesh  which  I  will  give  for 
the  life  of  the  world.”  “And  I,  if  I  be  lifted  up,  will  draw 
all  men  unto  Me.”  “Other  sheep  I  have,  not  of  this  (Jewish) 
fold,  them  also  I  must  bring,  and  they  shall  hear  My  voice 
and  there  shall  be  one  flock,  and  one  Shepherd.”  The  spirit 
that  guided  Him  from  the  beginning  until  at  the  last  He  died 
a  propitiation  for  the  sins  of  the  whole  world,  was  the  mission¬ 
ary  spirit.  His  prayers  were  missionary  prayers.  We  have 
only  a  few  of  those  prayers  preserved  to  us,  some  of  them  very 


6 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


fragmentary,  but  in  the  two  prayers  that  seem  in  some  adequate 
measure  to  reveal  to  us  His  inner  life  of  prayer,  we  get  visions 
of  what  the  missionary  spirit  must  have  been  in  His  prayer  life. 
When  giving  to  His  disciples  what  we  call  the  “Lord’s 
Prayer,’’  He  embodied  in  it  at  the  beginning  that  great  pe¬ 
tition  “Thy  Kingdom  Come,’’  and  I  have  often  wondered 
over  the  meaning  of  that  little  phrase  in  His  last  high-priestly 
prayer  as  He  walked  out  to  His  betrayal,  where  in  His  petition 
on  behalf  of  His  disciples,  He  remarks,  “I  pray  not  for  the 
world,  but  for  these  whom  T  hou  hast  given  Me  out  of  the 
world.’’  Why  does  He  say  “ not  for  the  world”  unless  He 
meant  to  imply  that  that  was  what  He  was  wont  to  do? 
It  might  be  supposed  that  that  would  be  what  He  would  do 
now.  The  disciples  could  have  gathered  no  other  interpretation 
from  His  life  than  that  which  they  did  gather,  that  God  was 
in  Him  reconciling  the  world  to  Himself.  A  great  German 
ethnologist  has  pointed  out  that  after  all  one  of  the  most  com¬ 
manding  sayings  of  St.  Paul  is  the  expression  where  he  describes 
the  vast  missionary  influence  of  Christ,  when  he  utters  his  opin¬ 
ion  that  in  Christ  the  three  great  divisions  that  had  divided  the 
ancient  world  had  all  been  obliterated,  the  line  of  distinction 
between  male  and  female,  between  bond  and  freeman,  between 
the  privileged  Jew  and  the  outer  and  unprivileged  world. 

Those  who  touch  Christ  and  feel  His  influence  behold  in 
Him  the  revelation  of  the  great  missionary  heart  of  God,  and 
not  alone  in  the  character  of  God,  and  in  that  character  as 
revealed  in  Jesus  Christ  our  Lord  have  we  some  clear  concep¬ 
tion  of  the  place  this  missionary  enterprise  holds  in  God’s 
thought;  we  have  it  also  here  in  what  we  firmly  believe  to  be 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


7 


the  word  of  God.  It  is  this  Book  that  tells  us  that  to  which  I 
have  just  been  giving  expression  regarding  the  spirit  of  Jesus 
Christ.  i  his  book  itself  is  the  record  of  the  great  missionary 
enterprise  begun  in  the  heart  of  God  and  carried  on  down 
until  this  day,  and  never  to  end  until  the  Kingdoms  of  this 
world  have  become  the  kingdoms  of  our  Lord  and  of  His  Christ. 
It  is  a  missionary  book  not  alone  here  and  there,  not  in  the  force 
of  some  occasional  missionary  saying  or  in  some  clear  word  of 
missionary  prophecy,  but  the  missionary  spirit  is  of  the  very 
essence  of  the  Bible.  So  that  you  cannot  take  the  missionary 
element  out  of  the  Bible  and  have  any  Bible  left  at  all.  It 
is  grounded  in  every  text  of  the  Word  of  God  as  it  is  grounded 
in  the  very  character  of  God  himself.  You  cannot  read  this 
revelation  without  feeling  your  heart  drawn  out  to  the  whole 
world  as  His  heart  was  drawn  out  for  it,  and  no  man  out  in  the 
darkened  world  can  read  it  without  feeling  that  the  God  of  that 
book  is  his  God  because  He  is  the  God  of  all  mankind. 

In  the  fourth  place  we  look  out  over  history,  and  history 
reveals  to  us  the  place  of  missions  in  the  thought  of  God.  No 
man  can  understand  human  history  who  does  not  read  it  in  the 
.light  of  the  place  that  the  missionary  enterprise  fills  in  God’s 
thought.  We  cannot  understand  the  history  of  the  Christian 
Church  save  on  this  basis.  The  history  of  that  old  Jewish 
church  becomes  just  a  torso,  a  fragment,  a  contradiction  of  the 
God  who  is  superintending  it,  unless  we  read  it  all  in  its  mission¬ 
ary  implication,  and  as  just  a  preparation  for  a  great  and  uni¬ 
versal  expression  of  the  love  of  God  to  all  mankind.  A  Christian 
Church  is  founded  on  no  other  principle  than  this,  the  simple 
principle  that  it  is  by  outgo  that  we  live  and  that  we  have  in 


8 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


order  that  we  may  share.  I  believe  myself  that  the  Christian 
Church  rests  on  the  very  same  principle  on  which  the  individual 
Christian  life  rests  and  that  the  man  who  seeks  to  save  his  life 
shall  lose  it,  and  by  the  same  law  the  Christian  Church  that 
seeks  to  save  her  life  shall  lose  it.  That  the  Christian  Church 
is  no  more  established  for  her  own  spiritual  growth  and  self- 
cultivation  than  that  individual  Christians  are  called  for  the 
cultivation  of  their  own  characters  as  the  supreme  aim  of  their 
calling.  We  are  called  to  serve  our  own  generation  and  the 
character  that  we  get  is  simply  a  by-product  of  our  service,  and 
by  just  the  same  law  I  believe  that  the  Christian  Church  is 
called  to  serve  the  world,  and  her  spiritual  growth  comes  to  her 
as  she  goes  out  in  the  furtherance  of  her  great  missionary  -un¬ 
selfishness  like  the  mission  of  unselfishness  that  led  her  Lord  to 
come  not  to  be  ministered  unto  but  to  minister  and  to  fulfil  His 
life  in  laying  it  down  as  a  ransom  for  many.  And  the  very 
laws  of  God  that  have  controlled  the  Christian  Church  in  her 
history  reveal  to  us  the  Will  of  God,  that  life  should  never  be 
severed  from  the  experience  of  missionary  impulse.  If  at  any 
time  in  her  history  the  Christian  Church  had  forgotten  her  duty 
to  the  world;  if  at  any  time  the  flames  of  missionary  devotion 
had  burned  low  upon  her  altars,  she  has  paid  for  it  invariably 
by  alienation  from  Christ  her  Lord  and  by  the  dying  down  of 
the  tides  of  His  life  through  her  veins.  And  if  at  any  time  in 
her  history  she  has  drawn  close  to  Him  once  more,  if  the  flames 
of  her  love  to  Christ  have  blazed  up  again  on  the  altar,  in¬ 
variably  that  nearness  to  Him  has  expressed  itself  in  a  fresh  out¬ 
go  of  love  for  the  whole  world,  in  a  fresh  devotion  to  the  great 
purposes  of  Christ,  to  bring  in  those  other  sheep  not  of  that 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


9 


Jewish  fold,  that  there  might  be  one  flock  and  one  Shepherd. 

In  a  little  book  on  “Asia  and  Europe,”  one  of  the  most 
suggestive  and  one  of  the  most  misleading  books  of  our  day, 
Mr.  Meredith  Townsend,  the  successor  of  Mr.  Hutton,  the 
editor  of  the  London  “Spectator,”  has  said,  that  while  he  be¬ 
lieves  the  missionary  duty  is  a  great  duty,  yet  it  is  a  perfectly 
futile  duty,  that  we  would  never  succeed  in  converting  any 
large  number  of  these  masses,  that  the  great  multitudes  of  them 

will  stop  when  they  die,  and  there  will  be  nothing  more  of  them 

✓ 

in  this  world  or  the  world  to  come.  But  futile  and  vain  as  he 
believes  the  duty  to  be,  it  is  duty,  and  the  Christian  Church 
should  go  out  in  obedience  to  the  missionary  impulse,  and  no 
Christian  Church  unless  it  is  a  mockery  of  a  Christian  Church 
can  fall  away  from  this  purpose.  We  cannot  understand  the 
history  of  the  Christian  Church  as  we  look  back  over  the  nine¬ 
teen  centuries  through  which  it  has  come  save  as  we  see  in  that 
history  a  clear  revelation  of  the  purpose  of  it  to  bless  the  Church 
that  falls  in  line  with  a  missionary  purpose  and  to  curse  the 
Church  that  denies  Him  by  denying  His  character  of  love  for 
all  mankind. 

And  it  is  not  alone  the  history  of  the  Christian  Church 
that  is  unintelligible  to  us  save  as  we  perceive  the  place  which 
this  missionary  enterprise  fills  in  the  thought  of  God.  I  do 
not  believe  that  we  can  understand  what  we  speak  of  as  secular 
history — which,  of  course,  in  our  eyes  has  no  existence  at  all 
— I  don’t  believe  that  we  can  understand  what  we  speak  of 
as  secular  history  except  in  the  light  of  this  great  conception  of 
the  place  of  missions  in  the  thought  of  God.  Take  such  a 
great  movement  of  the  last  century,  to  serve  as  a  concrete  illus- 


10 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


tration  of  what  I  mean,  as  the  Taiping  rebellion.  1  hat  was 
the  greatest  thing  that  happened  in  the  nineteenth  century  so  far 
as  illustrating  the  upheaval  of  great  institutions  is  concerned. 
1  he  eyes  of  the  world  were  hxed  on  other  things,  on  the 
wretched  Crimean  war,  on  our  Civil  strife,  on  the  changes  in  the 
development  of  Africa,  on  the  throes  out  of  which  South 
American  republics  were  growing.  Men  had  little  thought  of 
what  was  going  on  among  the  four  hundred  millions  of  people 
in  China,  but  there  was  a  great  upheaval  that  resulted  in  the 
death  of  thirty  millions  of  our  fellow  human  creatures,  in  the 
destruction  perhaps  of  billions  of  dollars  of  wealth,  and  in  the 
annihilation  of  organized  government  in  large  parts  of  half 
of  the  provinces  of  the  Chinese  Empire,  and  in  the  practical  ob¬ 
literation  of  India  wherever  its  influence  had  extended.  But 
no  man  will  ever  understand  it  who  does  not  understand  it  in 
the  light  of  what  God  is  doing  in  the  world  to  get  His  great 
missionary  thought  realized.  1  hat  great  upheaval,  the  great¬ 
est  upheaval  in  human  history  I  suppose,  all  sprang  out  of  a 
bundle  of  simple  Christian  tracts  dropped  in  the  responsive 
mind  of  a  Chinese  who  came  down  to  take  his  competitive  ex¬ 
aminations  in  the  last  century  in  Canton.  He  was  met  by  an 
old  gray  haired  disciple  of  Robert  Morrison,  who  carried  in  his 
hands  some  little  tracts.  The  young  man  took  them  to  his  home 
in  his  country,  and  some  years  after  he  read  them  and  found 
confirmation  of  some  great  visions  that  had  come  to  him,  and 
he  started  out  with  the  imagination  that  the  Christian  God  had 
commissioned  him  to  become  Emperor  of  China,  and  to  de¬ 
stroy  idolatry  and  the  opium  traffic  in  the  whole  of  the  Chinese 
Empire,  and  if  it  had  not  been  for  the  interference  of  “Chinese 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


11 


Gordon”  the  Taiping  rebellion  might  have  prevailed.  But  no 
man  will  ever  understand  that  great  movement  who  does  not 
understand  it  in  its  relationship  to  that  steady  activity  of  the 
Spirit  of  God  in  the  world  trying  to  get  His  missionary  purpose 
realized  and  fulfilled. 

And  in  the  great  occurrences  of  our  own  time,  what  is 
the  meaning  of  these  upheavals  that  have  come  upon  us  in  the 
far  East?  Do  they  have  significance  merely  in  Russian  po¬ 
litical  history?  Are  they  of  interest  to  the  world  only  as  they 
bear  on  Japanese  political  institutions?  The  strife  in  the  East 
is  of  no  larger  significance  in  human  history  save  as  it  bears  on 
great  spiritual  ends,  as  it  is  some  real  way  an  unfolding  of  God’s 
great  purpose,  and  another  step  toward  the  establishment  here 
on  earth  of  His  kingdom  that  shall  embrace  all  mankind.  We 
look  out  in  the  world  in  which  we  live  and  back  on  the  world 
in  which  our  fathers  lived,  and  it  all  speaks  to  us  with  just  a 
clear  and  unmistakable  voice  of  God’s  interest  in  all  humanity 
and  God’s  tireless  insistence  that  all  His  children  throughout 
the  whole  world  should  be  brought  home  again  at  last  and 
sheltered  in  His  love  and  the  security  of  His  kingdom. 

And  now,  at  last,  we  can  come  back  on  a  basis  like  this 
to  think  of  the  blessing  which  God  has  poured  out  on  the 
missionary  enterprise,  realizing  that  our  enterprise  is  grounded 
not  on  its  failures  or  on  its  successes,  that  it  rests  on  the  great 
character  of  God  and  the  manifestations  of  that  character  in 
His  revelation  of  it  in  human  history. 

Think  for  a  moment  of  the  way  in  which  he  has  gone 
beyond  all  that  we  have  done,  acting  Himself  far  beyond  the 
limits  of  our  utmost  activities,  touching  human  hearts  that  we 


12 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


have  scarcely  touched  save  as  we  have  just  dropped  a  seed  there 
in  the  ground  to  be  cared  for  and  nourished  and  brought  to  its 
fruition  by  Him. 

I  cannot  think  of  any  more  vivid  illustration  of  what  I 
have  in  mind  than  the  story  Lord  Radstock  gave  in  the  London 
Times  this  last  summer  with  reference  to  the  triumphant  suc¬ 
cess  of  Christian  missions  in  India.  He  was  speaking  of  the 
great  transformation  in  India  since  he  himself  had  gone  there 
thirty  years  before.  And  he  cited  one  instance  of  the  way  in 
which  far  beyond  the  knowledge  of  any  man,  God  was  work¬ 
ing  to  secure  the  conversion  of  Swami  Abhedananda.  Seven 
years  ago  he  was  in  Delhi  and  heard  an  Englishman  speaking 
and  he  just  caught  the  words,  “I  am  the  true  Vine.”  That 
awakened  in  the  breast  of  that  Hindoo  devotee  an  idea  of  the 
possibilities  of  the  communicated  life.  He  carried  around  on 
his  body  a  little  amulet  filled  with  the  dust  from  the  three  hun¬ 
dred  sacred  Hindoo  places.  No  missionary  talked  with  him, 
nobody  knew  what  was  going  on  in  that  Hindoo  devotee’s 
heart,  but  that  single  sentence  began  to  work  the  story  of  the 
divine  life  in  that  man’s  soul.  He  visited  the  Armenians  and 
he  went  to  Rome  that  he  might  study  Mohammedanism  and 
Christianity,  he  went  to  China  and  Japan  to  study  Confucian¬ 
ism  and  Buddhism,  and  after  seventeen  years  of  wandering  he 
came  back  to  Bengal  to  profess  his  belief  in  the  Bible  as  the 
word  of  God  and  Jesus  Christ  the  Son  of  God  as  the  only 
Saviour  of  mankind.  He  has  not  connected  himself  with  any 
Christian  Church.  You  and  I  would  find  very  much  unsatis¬ 
factory  in  his  Christian  opinions,  but  the  love  of  God  had  struck 
into  that  Hindoo  soul  beyond  any  power  of  ours.  The  life  of 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


13 


God  has  worked  in  that  single  life  as  it  is  working  in  many 
little  children  and  men  and  women  in  Asia.  No  missionary 
has  visited  them,  but  the  love  of  God  that  is  in  the  world  has 
struck  its  roots  deep  in  these  countries,  and  beyond  any  touch 
of  our  influence  is  doing  the  great  work  of  transforming  the 
kingdoms. 

Mr.  Cleland  was  referring  to  the  grand  momentum  of  the 
missionary  activities  of  the  early  Church.  We  are  just  be¬ 
ginning  to  feel  now  at  the  dawn  of  this  new  century  the  great 
heave  and  surge  of  the  missionary  activities  of  the  past.  The 
last  census  of  India  shows  a  population  that  in  the  decade  end¬ 
ing  1901  has  increased  three  per  cent,  over  the  whole  of  India, 
but  the  Hindoo  population  had  decreased  about  one-third  of 
one  per  cent.,  the  Mohammedan  population  had  increased  nine 
per  cent.,  and  the  Christian  population  increased  twenty-seven 
per  cent.,  and  the  Protestant  Christian  population  has  increased 
thirty  per  cent.  I  remember  hearing  Bishop  Moule  of  Hang 
Chow  of  the  Church  of  England  saying  that  when  he  first  came 
to  China  fifty  years  ago  there  were  only  fifty  Protestant  Chris¬ 
tians  in  the  whole  of  the  Chinese  Empire,  not  a  single  Protestant 
Christian  in  Japan,  in  Korea,  in  the  Laos  states  or  in  Siam, 
and  in  his  lifetime  he  had  seen  the  Christian  Church  in  Japan 
grow  from  nothing  to  more  than  forty  thousand;  in  Korea  from 
nothing  to  more  than  ten  thousand;  and  the  Protestant  popula¬ 
tion  of  China  grew  from  that  little  handful  of  fifty  when  he 
went  there  to  more  than  a  hundred  and  twenty  thousand  when 
the  devastation  of  the  Boxer  uprising  swept  across  the  empire. 
There  are  many  here  this  evening  who  will  live  to  see  the  people 
of  Asia  coming  every  year  by  the  hundred  thousand  into  the 
Christian  Church. 


14 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


Far  beyond  any  power  we  have  put  forth,  the  loving 
power  of  God  has  wrought  through  these  small  companies  of 
ours,  these  five  loaves  and  a  few  small  fishes  that  we  have 
brought  for  His  use. 

We  look  out  over  the  world  where  all  we  see  in  it  of  the 
activities  and  blessing  of  God  convinces  us  that  the  first  thing 
in  the  thought  of  God  is  the  end  that  He  had  in  view  when  “He 
so  loved  the  world  that  He  gave  His  only  begotten  Son,  that  * 
whosoever  believeth  on  Him  might  not  perish  but  have  ever¬ 
lasting  life,”  when  He  sent  forth  His  Son,  “not  to  condemn, 
but  to  save  the  whole  world.” 

So  friends,  if  the  missionary  enterprise  has  this  place  in  the 
thought  of  God,  will  we  not  ask  ourselves  whether  it  holds  any 
corresponding  place  in  our  lives?  Shall  that  be  second  with 
us  which  was  first  with  God?  Shall  that  for  which  God  gave 
up  His  Son  make  no  appeal  to  us  that  we  should  give  up  our 
sons,  and  that  for  which  Jesus  Christ  gave  up  His  life  strike 
no  such  chord  in  our  hearts  as  shall  call  upon  us  to  give  up  our 
lives  for  Him?  What  ought  the  individual  life  to  think  of  that 
of  which  God  thought  so  much?  If  the  missionary  enterprise 
is  first  in  the  thought  of  God,  ought  it  not  to  be  the  first  in  our 
own  thoughts  and  lives?  Is  it  the  first  in  our  lives?  I  speak 
to  you  men  here  this  evening,  is  the  missionary  enterprise  the  first 
business  in  your  life?  Does  it  have  a  place  above  your  own 
business  by  which  you  earn  your  living?  Does  it  have  a  place 
in  your  affections  beyond  any  of  your  personal  cares  or  con¬ 
cerns?  If  this  thing  is  first  with  God,  and  we  believe  in  God, 
must  this  thing  not  be  first  with  us,  God’s  sons? 

There  is  a  passage  in  Blaikie’s  personal  life  of  Living¬ 
stone  in  which  he  has  pictured  that  last  night  before  he  went 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


15' 


out  from  his  Scotch  home  to  his  great  work  in  Africa.  He 
says  all  that  last  night  Livingstone  and  his  father  sat  up  talk¬ 
ing.  Midnight  came  and  still  the  old  man  and  his  son  sat  side 
by  side  and  the  hours  ran  on  until  the  morning  of  the  day  on 
which  David  Livingstone  was  to  sail  from  his  home  to  Africa. 
And  the  one  subject  of  their  conversation  that  night  as  they  sat 
there  in  that  humble  Scotch  home  was  the  prospect  of  the  com¬ 
ing  of  the  day  when  man  would  look  for  the  coming  of  the 
Kingdom  of  God,  and  they  agreed  that  the  day  would  come 
when  men  would  live  to  make  money  for  the  Kingdom  of  God, 
when  there  would  be  Christian  men  who  would  support  mis¬ 
sionaries  and  even  entire  mission  stations.  Has  that  day  come 
in  the  lives  of  the  men  of  this  church?  If  we  believe  in  God, 
and  the  men  of  this  church  do  believe  in  God,  ought  not  the 
missionary  enterprise  to  have  practically  in  our  lives  the  place 
that  it  has  in  the  thought  of  God?  And  if  it  has  that  place  in 
His  thoughts  and  in  His  care,  and  in  His  family  life,  then 
ought  it  not  to  have  that  place  in  our  family  lives? 

Think  of  what  the  missionary  enterprise  called  forth  from 
the  family  life  of  God,  how  the  dearest  sacrifice  this  world  ever 
saw  was  made  in  the  bosom  of  God  in  behalf  of  the  evangeli¬ 
zation  of  the  world.  If  God  gave  up  His  only  Son  that  He 
might  go  out  as  a  missionary  to  the  unevangelized,  to  preach 
the  Gospel  of  God  to  the  children  of  God,  should  you  and  I 
be  reluctant  to  yield  up  the  dearest  that  we  possess?  Should 
not  the  missionary  enterprise  be  the  first  thing  in  our  home?  Is 
it,  my  friends?  Do  we  talk  about  it  around  our  firesides?  Do 
we  make  it  the  subject  of  conversation  with  our  children?  Do 
our  little  children  instinctively  pray  for  the  whole  world  and 


16 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


the  little  children  on  the  other  side  of  the  world?  Believe  me, 
if  we  believed  in  God  as  we  say  we  believe  in  Him,  and  realized 
that  the  chief  concern  of  God  is  that  His  world  might  be 
brought  back  again  to  Him,  we  should  feel  as  eager  to  achieve 
it  as  He  felt  eager  to  achieve  it  when  he  yielded  up  His  Son. 

I  know  what  men  say  when  the  missionary  obligation  is 
pressed  home  on  them  in  this  broad  way.  They  say  if  you 
speak  of  missions  in  that  way  you  are  simply  using  “missions” 
as  though  the  word  were  synonymous  with  Christian  activity. 
You  have  no  right  to  focus  on  the  evangelization  of  the  heathen 
world  the  entire  missionary  love  of  God.  But  what  a  simple 
device  it  is  on  our  part  for  holding  to  the  theory  of  a  God  of 
all  mankind  while  we  pull  Him  down  to  be  a  little  racial  God, 
which  is  all  He  is  to  most  of  us,  an  Anglo-Saxon  God, 
an  American  God,  a  European  God,  no  God  of  all  mankind. 
If  we  believed  in  Him  as  the  God  of  all  mankind  we  should 
be  driven  by  that  very  conception  of  him  to  go  with  our  Gospel 
to  all  mankind  and  to  deem  no  single  human  soul  dearer  to  Him 
than  any  other  human  soul,  and  every  human  soul  entitled  to 
the  Gospel  on  the  same  grounds  which  entitle  us  to  it,  and  need¬ 
ing  the  Gospel  on  the  same  terms  as  we  need  the  Gospel.  No 
consideration  gives  men  the  Gospel  or  makes  the  Gospel  of  any 
worth  to  men  that  does  not  lay  man  under  the  obligation  to 
give  that  Gospel  to  all  mankind.  We  have  it  on  terms  that 
make  it  the  property  of  every  human  soul.  We  have  it  be¬ 
cause  it  is  the  Gospel  of  a  God  who  loved  the  whole  world 
and  whose  child  every  child  of  man  is.  And  I  am  no  true 
child  of  His  nor  any  true  member  of  the  Church  that  bears  the 
name  of  His  Son  if  I  do  not  live  in  obedience  to  the  same  great 


MISSIONS  IN  THE  THOUGHT  OF  GOD 


17 


passion  that  swayed  him  in  desiring  to  see  the  ideals  of  His 
heart,  realized  in  the  coming  of  His  kingdom  throughout  the 
whole  world.  There  never  yet  has  been  any  branch  of  the 
Christian  Church  that  rose  to  the  level  of  this  great  conception. 

Once  a  Christian  Church  arose  resolved  to  achieve  this 
thing,  there  is  no  power  on  earth  that  could  stay  it.  With 
God  acting  with  it,  fulfilling  the  specific  mission  God  set  for 
it,  there  is  no  power  on  earth  that  would  stay  it  in  its  course. 
If  the  Christian  Church  throughout  the  whole  world  only  would 
live  by  the  faith  that  she  professes  .to  believe  we  could  make 
this  whole  world  God’s  in  fact  as  it  is  God’s  in  truth,  before 
the  generation  to  which  we  belong  had  passed  away  to  render 
its  account  to  Him.  Oh  my  friends,  what  unbelief,  what  cold¬ 
ness  of  heart,  what  attachment  to  evil,  keeps  us  back  from  our 
glorious  duty  and  our  splendid  privilege.  You  remember  the 
word  of  Keshub  Chunder  Sen.  He  did  not  see  very  clearly 
the  face  of  Jesus  Christ  on  which  we  have  looked.  He  had 
touched  only  the  distant  border  of  his  garment,  and  you  recall 
the  words  he  spoke  in  the  last  of  all  those  strange  addresses  of 
his  before  the  collapse  that  came  at  the  end.  “None  but  Jesus, 
none  but  Jesus,  none  but  Jesus  is  worthy  to  wear  the  diadem  of 
India,  and  He  shall  have  it.”  And  if  none  but  Jesus  is  worthy 
to  wear  the  diadem  of  India  who  but  Jesus  is  worthy  to  wear 
the  diadem  of  Egypt  or  of  South  America,  or  of  China,  or  of 
the  islands  of  the  sea?  Shall  He  have  it,  shall  He  have  it? 
My  friends,  let  us  do  our  best  to  get  it  for  Him,  and  when  we 
have  got  it  let  us  lay  it  down  upon  His  brow,  the  brow  of  the 
Saviour  of  all  mankind,  and  cover  with  its  glory  forever  the 
scars  of  that  crown  of  thorns  which  He  won  in  seeking  to  save 
the  whole  round  world. 


' 


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